Getting Back To The Front He Hadn't Done His Part And Wasn't Going Home Until He Did

July 30, 1985|By Gen. Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos, Special to The Sentinel

When I returned to England in the middle of May 1944, the guys in the squadron couldn't believe what they saw. Not only did they never expect to see me again, but I was 20 pounds heavier and brown as a hog in mud. I was the first evadee to make it back.

My shoulders were peeling from the Spanish sun, while the guys were pale and skinny. Flying daily above the weather, they got sunburn circles around their eyes -- contoured around the outlines of their oxygen masks and flying helmets -- and looked like a pack of damned raccoons. When I handed out a bunch of ripe bananas I brought back for them, man, they were speechless; they hadn't seen a banana since we left the States.

That's how I got so fat, I told them -- eating bananas in Spain while soaking up sunshine at a resort hotel. All expenses were paid by Uncle Sam, including civilian clothes, room, food and booze. By the time I was finished, they couldn't wait to bail out over Spain.

I was sent back to England to pack my bags: I was going home. No more combat. The regulations were strictly enforced to protect the underground in occupied countries who assisted Allied airmen. German intelligence kept dossiers on most of us and knew who had been shot down before; they'd go right to work on your fingernails if you were shot down again.

In Spain, I looked forward to going home and marrying my girlfriend, Glennis. But from the moment I arrived back at Leiston Air Base, I knew that this was where I belonged until I had done my share of the fighting. I felt like a bug-out artist. And the idea of sitting out the war as a damned flight instructor in Texas somewhere tore me up.

Guys like Bud Anderson and Don Bochkay were already double aces who completed their tours and then volunteered for more. I was raised to finish what I started, not slink off after flying only eight missions. Screw the regulations. And when I said as much to friends like O'Brien, they looked at me as if my brains had been boiled into oatmeal by the Spanish sun.

BUCKING THE SYSTEM PUT LIFE ON TRACK

Group put me in for the Bronze Star for helping Pat the bomber pilot who escaped with Yeager to make it over the Pyrenees, and my friends told me to take my medal and run. I was scheduled to fly to New York on June 25.

''No way,'' I said.

Evadee rule or not, I figured the war had been cut out from under me before I could make worthwhile all those hard and expensive months of combat training. There wasn't a rule ever invented that couldn't be bent. So I marched on group headquarters and began to fight.

Without realizing it, I was about to take charge of my life and push it in a direction where everything that happened in later years was a logical outcome for a career fighter pilot who had compiled an outstanding combat record. If I had submitted to being sent home, I doubt whether the Army Air Corps would have been interested in retaining my services when the war ended. I would've been just another non-commissioned officer who had spent most of the war instructing young fighter pilots how to fly. Not very impressive. I would probably have been mustered out and my flying career abruptly ended. But I wasn't consciously thinking about my future; I was just being stubborn about the present. I knew the odds were stacked against me, but in the end events and luck came together for me, and one man -- the only one who could -- decided my fate: Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I was brassy, and pushed my way up the chain of command at group headquarters, arguing my case. And because I was the first evadee to make it back, the majors and colonels I talked to were kinder than they might have been and helped me to keep climbing the ladder by allowing me to go to London and talk to the brass at Supreme Headquarters.

Everyone I saw told me I couldn't stay, but the brass enjoyed meeting a very junior officer who refused to go home. ''We'd like to help,'' I was told, ''but the regulations won't allow it.'' While I was being passed around among colonels and generals at SHAPE Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe, the Allies launched the invasion of Normandy on June 6, and the London newspapers reported that the French Maquis were now openly battling the Germans in the hedgerows of Normandy behind the lines.

''Well, there you go,'' I remember telling a colonel at SHAPE, ''the Maquis are out in the open now, and there's no way I can blow them to the Gestapo if I were shot down again.''